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VSA Performance with SSD tier & SmartCache/CacheCade?

Does anyone have any real-world performance they'd care to share on using StoreVirtual VSA with a good sized SSD tier and perhaps adding an SSD backed RAID cache (SmartCache/CacheCade) please?

We use StoreVirtual right now (4300/4500 G2) and whilst the feature set is a bit lacking it's been flawless in terms of uptime so when it's replaced one option is two or four boxes running VSA doing combined storage/compute.

I'm still not entirely clear whether I can "force" a LUN to SSD (i.e. SQL databases) or if all I can do is enable tiering and hope/assume it will mostly be tiered?

Looking at something like a 16 or 20 bay dual E5-26xx box with 4x SSDs in RAID5 and 7.2K SAS for the rest in hardware RAID10.

Also I'd be very interested in thoughts on 2 nodes vs. 4 in a two-site metro-cluster with a dedicated third site running the FOM.

Re: VSA Performance with SSD tier & SmartCache/CacheCade?

YMMV!

These are real world numbers that I took from my ever evolving setup. As you can see the numbers are all over the place.My take is this: I've so far found that VSA 2014 with AO does not offer the same performance as using SSDs only as the underlying storage for a VSA. It might have to do with the amount of data that I currently have on the AO enabled nodes.Maybe the AO cache hit ratios are too low?

My storage is mostly used for VM boots, SQL and Exch. Using most HP Enterprise SSD and BL IO (fusion IO) cards, and HP 6GBs SAS.VSAs are on Proliant BLC blades with 10GbE interconnects w. 4Gbs Max dedicated to the SAN Vnet in VC. I've thrown in a direct attached SSD metric for reference.Note that the formatted block size for the LUNs will naturally affect the performance of the LUNs. I've included 4K and 8K metrics.

Re: VSA Performance with SSD tier & SmartCache/CacheCade?

Thought that was the case sadly.

It's stil up there. My biggest concern right now is restripe times - the 50TB VSA licenses are a great idea because we could get the capacity in 2 boxes (with hardware RAID10 for performance) but the restripe time should I lose a box concerns me a lot.